I love Zemanta. It’s my favorite blogging plug-in, and I am so hooked on it that I even declared I’d rather pay for it than lose it. Fortunately that may not be necessary for a while: at the recent Defrag Conference I met co-Founder & CTO Andraz Tori, who told me about several monetization concepts next year, and none involve directly charging users.

But forget monetization, let’s focus on why I really like it: it’s amazingly good in recommending contextually relevant related posts. I do like listing related sources, whether they agree with my point or not, and Zemanta is great time-saver in the process. That is for textual context … I haven’t been too happy with the “relevant” image recommendations.

Andraz explained the problem was that I often write about abstract business concepts: if this was a travel, cooking, shopping, art..etc related blog, they’d get far better matches from Flickr, Wikipedia, Getty Images and a number of related sources. That said, they had one amazingly intelligent hit: while in my post titled Turn the Doom-talk into Constructive Business Model Ideas I did not once use the words train or train-wreck, Zemanta correctly inserted a photo of an actual train-wreck. Does Zemanta understand abstract concepts, metaphors? (As Andraz later explained, my post was likely associated with others who used the term train-wreck to describe the shape of the economy)

That said I was reading with interest Zemanta’s call to use the deafult picture recommendations as inspiration for blogging.

Well, let’s see what the defaults are .. fire up the editor, and voila!

Hm… I must admit it is indeed an inspiring photo… just not sure I want to blog about it here. It would change the nature of CloudAve forever.